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Voxer Transforms Into A Walkie-Talkie Service For The Business World
Jun 26, 1:30AM
Voxer is making its entrance into the business world with a set of new high-end features for its walkie-talkie style, push-to-talk service. Voxer Pro and Voxer Pro For Business run on Android and iOS devices just as with the standard service.If unfamiliar, the Voxer service is an app for sending voice and text messages. Download the app, import your contacts and then start sending messages.Intel Spinoff GainSpan Closes On $19M In Series D Funding For Its WiFi Chip Technology
Jun 26, 1:16AM
GainSpan, the semiconductor company that deals in ultra low-power Wi-Fi technology, has closed on $19 million in a new funding round. The round, which first started gathering steam in 2012 and appears to have closed at about $1 million less than the company had initially sought, serves as GainSpan's Series D and brings its total investment to around $75 million. This investment included the participation of two new investors -- Zebra Technologies Corporation and Oplink Communications -- and a slate of previous investors including Opus Capital, Intel Capital, New Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Camp Ventures and Hatteras Funds. GainSpan's last funding round was an $18 million Series C that closed in December 2011.Watchup's Video News App Becomes More Automated And Context-Rich In Its Latest Update
Jun 25, 11:46PM
Watchup, the startup aiming to create the tablet version of the daily news broadcast, has released version 2.0 of its iPad app, adding features for both casual and power users. The Watchup app pulls news videos from a range of sources, such as the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, and the Wall Street Journal, and it stitches them together into a continuous playlist. Initially, users had to manually choose from Watchup's videos, but in a recent update the company added the ability to automatically assemble a playlist based on your preferences, and to schedule a daily newscast.Heads Up, Haters, 70% Of The U.S. Has A Gay Friend On Facebook
Jun 25, 11:46PM
Americans are growing more open about their sexuality, and that could defeat prejudice. In honor of Gay Pride week, Facebook ran the numbers and found 70% of US users are friends with someone who lists themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual on their Timeline. That fact could remind people they're hurting someone they know when they're intolerant or use homophobic slurs.Havok's Completely Free 3D Engine For Mobile Game Developers Is Now Available
Jun 25, 11:35PM
Hey, aspiring game developers! Listen up. Way back in March, we outlined Project Anarchy, a new 3D engine from Havok (the same people that built the engine behind some of the world's biggest games, from Assassin's Creed to Halo 4) that would be completely free to mobile game developers. At the time, the only target they'd give for when it'd be available was "sometime this spring". Well, Project Anarchy has just gone live. It's a few days outside of Spring in the northern hemisphere — but hey, I'll forgive'm. Free game engine!BitTorrent Would Really Like Everyone To Stop Suggesting It's Being Used For Piracy
Jun 25, 10:07PM
At this point, you've probably read about how popular Game of Thrones is on BitTorrent — and there's at least one article calling the show "the once and future king of BitTorrent." Well, it sounds like BitTorrent, the company developing the open source file-sharing protocol of the same name, is getting a bit tired of the coverage. In a just-published blog post, the company's vice president of marketing Matt Mason argues that it's inaccurate to talk about a BitTorrent piracy record, because "piracy happens outside the BitTorrent ecosystem":Digg Reader Is A Promising, But Still Incomplete, Google Reader Alternative (Hands On)
Jun 25, 9:35PM
Digg's Reader is here, but it's not a Google Reader replacement...yet. For a subset of the Internet's population, Google's March announcement of its intention to shutter its dated, rusting RSS feed reading service Google Reader, was met with a large outcry. Though never having grown to a size that made the service worth sustaining in Google's eyes, its niche user base was devoted and heavily engaged. They were the Internet's most active readers, the power users capable of handling more advanced tools for digging up all the interesting things you can find on the web.Digg Reader Is Now Open
Jun 25, 9:24PM
Exactly one week before Google Reader shuts down entirely, Digg has opened up access to the Digg Reader beta. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we sat down with General Manager Jake Levine and President Andrew McLaughlin to discuss the details of the product, as well as the long-term roadmap. Digg now has two main products, which reach entirely different content consumers. Digg is a passive-consumption experience — you head over to Digg.com and check out 50-80 of the biggest stories of the day with no work required on your part. With Digg Reader, the company is going after power consumers who don’t mind putting in a little effort to build their feeds. But Digg and Digg Reader are only pieces of a larger puzzle, McLaughlin explained to me. Eventually, the data sourced from Digg Reader will allow for a consumption experience with all the personalization and customization of a reader, but without all the work. But before the middle ground can be found, the team is focused on perfecting the Digg Reader experience, and that involves speed. According to Levine, speed and reliability — “the invisible things that you don’t see” — were the biggest challenges in developing the product. After all, Google had a massive, powerful infrastructure to power their Reader, and Digg wants users who are transitioning to have a similarly snappy experience. But they don’t want to just be as good as Google. They want to be better. For now, that means tweaking and iterating the Popular Sort, which scores the last thousand or so items across a number of factors to determine what is the most popular content at that given time. Eventually, that will extend into what’s popular within your social circles, or over a given period of time, or in a particular location. However, Digg Reader is missing one thing that Google Reader has: Search. According to McLaughlin and Levine, it’s still undecided whether or not Search (which will be added to the service eventually) will be part of the premium product or the free version. “Search isn’t something that the majority of people use, but those who use it find it to be very important,” said Levine. “We haven’t decided if we’ll make it part of the premium product, but it’s entirely possible since it’s one of the more expensive features we’ll be adding. We’re toying with the idea of having pricing lineNew Joyent Service Offers Analytics Without Having To Move Data
Jun 25, 9:01PM
Data is really hard to move. It becomes pretty much intractable as it increases in mass. Sure it can be pulled out, but that takes time and bandwidth and incurs a host of costs typically associated with using a cloud service. To really get the most of all that stored data, it's increasingly apparent that moving it is not really a good idea. Joyent's new Manta Storage Service puts the compute together with the data in the cloud where it can be processed in one place. The compute is available directly on the object store, meaning that the data can be queried immediately without having to manage all the underlying infrastructure.A Professional Viner's Take On Instagram Video
Jun 25, 8:58PM
I've already said my piece when it comes to the Vine vs. Instagram video debate, but what do other users have to say about it? Instagram and Vine user Meagan Cignoli posted the same stop-animation video on Vine and Instagram, and asked her followers which was better. She's a power user on both platforms, with nearly 10,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 200,000 followers on Vine.Keen On… Ninja Innovation: What A Guy From Detroit Can Teach Silicon Valley About Innovation
Jun 25, 8:30PM
Does Silicon Valley still lead the world in innovation? Yes, says Gary Shapiro, the long-time CEO and President of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and author of the best-selling selling new book, Ninja Innovation: The 10 Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses. But, Shapiro - who lives in Detroit and works in Washington DC - reminds us, that dominance is fragile.Reminder: The Seattle TC Meetup + Pitch-Off Is Going Down On July 18
Jun 25, 7:44PM
It feels like just yesterday we were congratulating the winners of our TC Meetup + Pitch-Off in Austin, and yet we're less than a month away from the very next epic evening of startuptacular pitchemonium. Seattle, are you ready? The Seattle TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off is going down on July 18 at ShowBox at the Market, from 6pm to 10pm. Alongside beer, good people, and great conversation, there will also be a 60-second pitch-off where entrepreneurs have a minute flat to dazzle and excite a panel of judges.Hortonworks Raises $50M For Expansion And Development In Growing Hadoop Oriented Data Analytics Market
Jun 25, 7:00PM
Hortonworks announced on its blog this morning that it has raised $50 million in new financing to accelerate the growth and development of its Hadoop distribution for data analytics and the application in operations and transaction-based systems. The investment was led by new investors Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Yahoo!Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With NEA's Jon Sakoda
Jun 25, 6:00PM
On this week's Ask A VC, we have NEA's Jon Sakoda. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we'll ask them during the show.Google Launches Google+ Photos App For Chromebook Pixel, Coming Soon To Other Chrome OS Devices
Jun 25, 5:18PM
Google has launched a Google+ photos app for the Chromebook Pixel, something it actually previewed way back at the Pixel launch, and screens showed up in February, but it has taken until now to get the Google+ to wide release. The app plugs into your Google+ account, and will automatically upload photos on any SD card plugged into the device back to your Drive account, in either full resolution (with a limited cap) or Google's standard 2048px wide format (unlimited) depending on what the user chooses.Microsoft Partners With Deem To Expand Its Ad Inventory With More Local Offers And Deals
Jun 25, 5:12PM
Microsoft and e-commerce platform Deem, which is still better known under its previous name of Rearden Commerce, have inked a partnership that will allow Microsoft to distribute Deem's large inventory of local deals on its properties. While you probably haven't heard of Deem or Rearden, the company is currently valued at $1 billion and has received over $340 million in VC capital and investments since it was founded 13 years ago. Microsoft will feature Deem deals and offers from its network of more than 1.2 million merchants on properties like Bing, Outlook.com and MSN, as well as in Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps.Movile Launches PlayKids TV, Its Own Video App Just For Kids
Jun 25, 5:00PM
Let's face it: Video content for kids is a big business, with video distributors like Netflix and Amazon seeking to get the next generation of viewers hooked on their services. Mobile entertainment company Movile is getting in on the action as well, with a kid-focused video app called PlayKids TV.On Its 2-Year Anniversary, Onswipe Says It Has Delivered Tablet Content To 125M+ iOS Users
Jun 25, 4:40PM
To celebrate the second anniversary of its launch, touch publishing startup Onswipe is releasing its first Onswipe Sage report, offering data on who's actually reading its publishers' content. The big number, which is both a nice bragging point for Onswipe and a sign that its data has some broader significance, is 127,733,480 — that's how many iOS users the company has served in the past two years (as of last night, at least). Back in December, CEO and co-founder Jason Baptiste said that Onswipe was serving 10 million monthly active users, and he told me that number is now in the "tens of millions," but this is the first time Onswipe has released a total user count.Supreme Court Cuts Voting Rights Act, But Online Voter Tools Could Boost Minority Turnout
Jun 25, 4:36PM
There's no reason to be entirely glum about the Supreme Court's decision to strike down provisions of the Voting Rights Act: the growing accessibility of online voting and registration spells good things for traditionally marginalized groups. As I've written about before, California's experiment in online voter registration had (surprisingly) the biggest impact on Latino voters. And the eventual arrival of online voting itself could herald a big win for minority voters who often have to wait longer in lines and have a harder time taking Tuesdays off to get to the voting station.Zumbl.com Is Like Chatroulette Without The Privates
Jun 25, 4:17PM
Remember Chatroulette? That was a good time. Anyway, two IIT Delhi computer science students, Abhishek Gupta and Saurabh Kumar have created a chat system that allows you to find random people based on your interests. Unlike competitors like Omegle, Zumbl.com aims to match people with rooms containing folks who tend to like the same things, be they knitting, self abuse, or sci-fi. Obviously the site is a little quiet right now – the pair have seen about 3,000 users in the past few days – but they’re pretty bullish on the idea: they dropped out of college to enter the Digital Media Zone, Toronto incubator in 2012. “We are going a step further from Facebook Graph Search where we not only give people the ability to search for other people of their choice but also, a way to contact them,” said Gupta. The service focuses on avatars that grow as you use the service. “Our idea of avatars is one of its kind where the avatar of a person evolves on the basis of his/her behavior unlike the conventional marketplaces offered by imvu.com. More precisely, after a conversation the tags that one receives as a part of the feedback from the other users shapes his avatars. This ensures that the avatars add meaningful value to the profiles.” One clever hack they’ve added is a Snake-like game that you play while waiting for people to chat with. It’s a nice time-waster before you waste a little time chatting. The team has raised $20,000 from the CEO of Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl, to help support the 8 member student team and they accepted $20,000 in 2012 from the Digital Media Zone. They are seeing 450,000 messages per day in 15,000 chats, a good number for a site still in alpha. “During my first year at college, someone introduced me to Omegle.com while I was looking for portals to chat with strangers. It required you to talk profanely or switch on your webcam or pretend to be an American girl to strike a conversation. As an experiment, I started working with two friends on a facebook application to let users chat meaningfully,” said Gupta. “Since then, we have pivoted in small ways according to the user feedback, highly inspired by the ideas of a Lean Startup.” Thus far folks have been pretty nice on the site. Because you can up or downvote users andIf at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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